


Making N

by shadoedseptmbr



Series: L'essai Et Repose [18]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Gen, N School, learning to be a person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:47:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27977580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadoedseptmbr/pseuds/shadoedseptmbr
Summary: James has a few questions about Aedan's N experience.
Series: L'essai Et Repose [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1937545
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8





	Making N

James had flopped down into the seat next to her, still radiating heat and damp from his shower and Aedan couldn’t help but glance him over with a smirk. He snorted at her before he asked. “So...how hard was it?”

Shepard raised an eyebrow. “I get the feeling I missed the lead-in to a joke, somewhere, Jimmy. I thought you didn’t wanna hear about my sex life.”

“No...ugh, Lola.” He groaned as she chuckled. “N school, that first go round. How bad?”

She shrugged. “I mean, other than the sense that they actually wanted to kill us, it was fine.”

“They drop you on a rock, one day’s ration for a week, five days oxygen and it was fine?”

The grin that crossed her face bordered on evil. “If I can figure out a way to do it and not draw every Reaper in the quadrant, you’ll find out.”

“I’m up for it. But really, how bad?”

“I mean...they’ll want me to tell you it was the hardest thing I’d ever done and it was but...I think unlike a lot of the N candidates being hungry and literally on the verge of death wasn’t exactly new territory for me.” Sometimes being elite didn’t translate to hard, no matter what sort of training they threw at you.

“So...you made it look easy? Shepard the Legend.” He mimed a banner with his hands in the air and she almost spit out the coffee she’d been sipping.

“No. NO. I nearly failed out N3.” 

“What tripped you up?”

Aedan hesitated before she admitted, “Uh. This.” 

“I’m not following.” He had his head cocked like a confused puppy and it was fucking adorable. _Jesus, Ash, why aren’t you here to take this guy for a spin? Someone ought to._

“This.” She waved her hand at the Normandy and tried to explain. “When they build N’s, they don’t just want automatons, super soldiers. They want leaders. They want people who can work and stand in front and make people follow. They want you to be the fucking example of cooperation and if you do all the shit on your own and no one around you benefits, then you fail.”

“Not buying it." James scoffed. "Come on, Shep. Everyone who knows you, knows you for _that_. For being the leader. You did it at Elysium and that was before you made N.”

Elysium was luck, the side of her that could shoot all day, and the fact that she’d been perfectly willing to put civilians in holes that needed filling. That had been Ace and some strategy lessons. There wasn’t anything honorable about Elysium. Aedan twitched a shoulder.

“I managed to get past every obstacle they threw at me but I was supposed to be bringing people with me. Instead of looking at them and thinking, “Oh, I know what’ll trip you,” I was supposed to be saying “Oh, do this it’ll work better” and I just...couldn’t fucking do it.” 

He waited while she took another drink of her coffee, watching her patiently. 

“They do these...mentoring things starting in 3. The brass brings you in, hooks you up with someone not too much older who’d just been through the program. They run you through your scenarios and give advice. Mine went by the name of Ferrars. She was a goddamn machine but smart as fuck. Went into Intelligence, later. And after 3, when I was supposed to be in the bar celebrating, she brought me in and kept fucking poking. Didn’t matter that I’d spent all day underwater breathing through a reed and fighting off indigenous leech things and still got the osb they’d hidden under a rock in the middle of a fucking salt marsh and then reconfigured it to work in tech two decades old. What mattered is that I walked past two people who just needed a hand and one guy who almost died. And I couldn't see it. My job was to finish the course, so was theirs.” 

“But...that’s right. They weren't going to pass people who couldn’t do it on their own.”

“No, of course not. They’d wash out, stay 2’s. No shame in it. Less than a fourth of the candidates who start at 1 make it to 3.” She fixed him in her gaze. “So what did I miss?”

“You weren’t supposed to hold their hands, I guess. But you should have checked on them, gotten them back up if they could.”

“The only thing that saved me is that I finished the course in record time. They couldn’t not pass me. But a year went by and they didn’t invite me back for the next rung. And I couldn’t fucking figure out why. So next leave I had, I tracked down my “mentor”, cornered her on Arcturus in the weight room and tried to figure out what the fuck.”

“And…” James was tracing the subtle wave in the metal table top with his thumb, not quite avoiding her eyes.

“And she dragged me by the ear to Earth and ran my ass off around the obstacle course at Costa. The three day one with the cliff and the waterfall and the tiger pit?” The expression on James’ face as he swore told her he knew it and she lifted her mug in a cheer. “Yeah. No prep, no conditioning. No gear. And instead of taking advantage of any stumble, any hand off, any slip in the mud, she hung with me until I got my ass back up and kept going. Never said a word, just...stayed. I didn’t need her to, but it was...like, I wanted to get back up and keep up. Just because she was standing there. And about the fifth mouthful of mud, on the second day, I figured it out.”

“After- when I was laying on the ground trying to make my brain function enough to walk to the canteen- she explained. They’d made some mistakes in the early days of the N program. Passed some candidates who were physically and mentally able on every level, but they never tested compassion. Never tested if the people they were giving all this mobility, tech, leeway were...decent human beings. And it backfired on them. They had to cut a few off after some disasters. Alec Ryder. Kai Leng. Folks like that. They made...monsters and didn’t want to do it again.

And I didn’t make that cut. Well, on the verge of not making the cut. They’d gone through my record. Did a psyche profile, figured they knew why and it was being debated if I was smart enough to figure it out. Or ask.”

“And because you asked?”

“Twenty years of being my own backup, of looking out for myself first got me to 3. And then nearly cratered my whole damned career.” She stared down into the remnants of her black coffee. “So, when I got my letter for 4 a few months later, I talked with a few of the candidates. When one of ‘em was racing me up a cliff, he’d run out of carabiners and couldn’t rig one. So I lent him one and we got back to the race. 5 was a collaborative thing that I absolutely would have failed before, made it no problem. N6, I took some time, organized a couple of folks I knew and we all made it together. 7...7’s a bitch. They really do want you to do that one on your own. Oxy dep and all on a ball of ice. Chick who’d been lapping my ass put a foot wrong in a crevasse and shattered her whole thigh bone and I got her off the ice and flagged the medivac, put me nearly in last place and I had to climb back up with a third of the oxygen I should have had. I was fucking bleeding from my eyes when I made it to base. But she lived and I made 7.” A twisted smirk crossed her face. “Delia saved my ass six months later, pulled me out of a Batarian chem dump about three minutes before it blew sky high. I’d’ve been in no sort of shape to grab a shuttle for the Normandy when Anderson gave me the call, if she hadn’t.” 

“So...all the little scouts gotta hold hands to make it up the mountain?” He wrinkled his nose at the idea.

“Something like that. You know, maybe the cut is different for everyone. For me...The gang I grew up in wasn’t like that. They talked all the time about how we were family and I guess. I mean, I thought so. But they’d cut you out like sharks if they caught blood in the water. And I...I learned that lesson real well. No one got to see the blood and I got to be a _legend_.” She rolled her eyes as she said it and he laughed but it was a little hollow.

“And this is better?”

“You want to lone wolf it after Fehl, babe, I don’t blame you. God knows, I forget sometimes and try. But this...if I stick a hand out here? Sixteen people are gonna have my back. If I go down, Garrus is gonna haul me back up. If I go silent, Liara’s gonna have every camera and mic in the quadrant listening for a whimper. If I’m on the side of an exploding volcano, Joker’s gonna bend the laws of space and time and park the Normandy on a pinhead to pick me up.” She waved her cup between them, “Fuck, Jimmy, don’t you think this is better?”

**Author's Note:**

> this fits somewhere in my bigger story, i'm just not sure where so I haven't moved it to the series column yet. Same Aedan Shepard. Come chat with me @shadoedseptmbr on tumblr.


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